Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Christmas Jackpots


Jackpot was a great but short-lived comic that ran from 1979 - 1982. In that time three Christmas issues were produced, the first had (in my opinion) the best cover with artwork by Sid Burgon.

Although not actually the Christmas issue this issue of Jackpot dated 13th December 1980 did have a Christmas theme on it. The Laser Eraser strip inside had nothing to do with the cover. I'm unsure who the artist is here; Robert Nixon illustrated the strip but this cover definitely isn't by him.


The 1980 Christmas cover was again illustrated by Sid Burgon and featured Jack Pott (actually a character originally from Cor and surprisingly not the main character in Jackpot) and Angel from Angel's "Proper" Charlies (a spoof of Charlie's Angles) pulling a cracker.


The final Christmas issue came out in 1981 and had a very similar cover design to the 1980 cover above, with two people, this time pulling a wishbone, surrounded by holly and other Christmas decorations. Robert Nixon replaced Sid Burgon for this final Christmas cover.


Jackpot was a great comic but sadly folded only a few weeks later in January 1982. During it's time it was a fantastic comic though with some interesting features including a 'design the cover' competition, some of which were actually used! But that's all a tale for another time.

7 comments:

Andy Boal said...

Possibly possibly possibly is the Laser Eraser cover by Paul Ailey?

Irmantas said...

Nice festive blog masthead, George! I like the stocky version of Frankie Stein :)

Peter Gray said...

The father Christmas one made on to the Big Comic cover...it is a good one...

Jackpot could be getting a kiss soon with the mistletoe above..;0)

Also love your masthead..

George Shiers said...

@ Andy - I can definitely see some connections between the cover and Paul Ailey's work, but I'm not sure on that one.

@ Peter - I've never seen that cover on Big Comic myself but it is a good one!

Credit for the masthead goes to Clive Huckstepp! Cheers Clive!

Anonymous said...

Cool masthead. Are you going to do posts about those comics?

George Shiers said...

I don't think I'll be covering these comics. Well, not this year at least, but maybe another year.

George Shiers said...

The scans for the covers come from Lew Stringer's blog Blimey:

http://lewstringer.blogspot.com